No format will survive without the backing of at least some of the major movie studios. The DVD+HD format has the backing of exactly zero movie studios (unless there are some Chinese studios that back it, and that's the same as nothing for the American market).
If somebody doesn't get wise and release a dual-format Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player soon, I see the Chinese filling *that* gap. And they'll probably make billions doing so. It's the obvious answer to the current format wars. And the only thing stopping its appearance is the bullheaded stupidity of a lot of movie studio and electronics company executives.
Prohibitions against gambling work just as well as prohibitions against alcohol and other mind-altering substances. i.e. not at all, in either the real world or a virtual one. It's a losing battle, and Linden Labs will eventually lose this one.
I'd suspect that Linden is under some pressure from some government somewhere, and that's the real reason they're doing this.
There will always be people willing to trade their hard-earned Linden dollars for the thrill of possibly winning a lot more from someone else, no matter how long the odds. Those people will now take their money elsewhere, to the detriment of Linden Labs and all the denizens of Second Life.
Not just articles, whole books. 1975, Prentice Hall, The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive It? by Lowell Ponte:
The NAS report was shocking, for it represented a warning from some of the world's most conservative scientists that an Ice Age, beginning in the near future... was not impossible.... We simply cannot afford to be unprepared for either a natural or man-made climatic catastrophe.... Global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 110,000 years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance: the survival of ourselves, our children, our species.
If coercively-financed "science" were not the driver behind the current hysteria over Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, then you might have a point.
Just think what might happen if coercive financing for such "science" completely stopped, and taxpayers didn't have to pay for their own economic holocaust.
And economic holocaust is just what the catastrophists are calling for. See the Kyoto Protocol if you are an economic holocaust denier.
From the parent video:
It's the story of the distortion of a whole area of science. I would have to concur.
You say it could
potentially end the human race. Well that's evidence of hysteria, not rationality. The only "evidence" for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is a set of computer models that can never, and will never, be verified experimentally.
In the terminology of the scientific method so worshipped by those who tout the "consensus" on "global warming", these models are unverifiable.
I find it hilarious that the denizens of Slashdot, those most intimately familiar with the foibles of computation, would be so taken by a theory that is 99% based on computer models. Our planet's climatic system is just too large and chaotic for any computer model to ever even approach a reasonable facsimile of "truth". If computer models are so good at predicting the climate, how come your local weatherperson is only about 50% right about whether or not it's going to rain tomorrow?
The convenient lies of the global catastrophists are just the latest excuse for governments (world: UN, national: US Federal, state: California) to further their growth, intrusiveness, horrendous costs, and tyrannical control over our lives. Governmental costs both in dollars and in human lives are far more likely to cause the end of the human race than is Mother Nature.
The last time this kind of hysteria gripped the world, "they" banned DDT. Now, 80 Million preventable human deaths later, "they" are finally admitting "they" made a mistake and now allow DDT for the killing of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Giant corporations are created by the government. They are chartered by the government. They are regulated by the government. 98% of the behavior you ridicule and hate is either required by regulation or statute. Given that arrogation of power over telcos (post roads etc. notwithstanding) isn't granted by the Constitution, and thus federal regulation of telcos is blatantly unconsitutional, this is a failure of government. You're just proposing more unconstitutional government intervention and higher taxation to provide government-financed infrastructure. We don't have government grocery stores, and we get provided pretty decent food because of it. The government school system has broken down to where it has become a prison system for indoctrinating its students ("Just another Brick in the Wall") in the primary efficacy of government solutions for all problems. And yet you propose more expensive (read "coercively-funded") bureaucratically-designed and -operated systems. You really think this will be better? Ah yes. And North Korea is a worker's paradise!!!
Lobbyist? Well, if the government didn't arrogate the (blatantly unconstitutional) power to regulate the telcos, then the lobbyists wouldn't have anything to lobby about. This is a government failure, not a market failure.
It's been nothing but problematic for me. Tried to get my DVI-D equipped Comcast (Motorola) cable box to talk to my HDMI equipped TV. It would never do anything but alternate decent picture and static every ten seconds or so. My guess is that the TV's HDMI implementation didn't include a non-encrypted mode. But it could be that the HDCP from the cable box was just way off-standard. Or both were off-standard. Or HDCP sucks. Your choice.
Then I hooked up my properly-HDMI-equipped HD (also Motorola) Comcast cable box to talk HDMI to my DLP projector. Besides the fact that it would just show random snow about every other time I turned it on, the HDMI picture was seriously maladjusted for color, brightness, contrast, etc. Now I could probably go in and recalibrate everything on the projector so that the HDMI picture looked as good as the (still working fabulously) component analog connection. But that's too much hassle. The component analog 1080i picture is superb, so I'm sticking with it. Fortunately, I found a 5M HDMI cable on amazon.com for only $14.95 or so, so I didn't spend much on the experiment.
From my perspective as a relatively technically-literate user, HDCP and HDMI suck bigtime. Don't waste your money.
P.S. When I got my Comcast HD box (the one with a 120GB Seagate drive that stores about 15 hours of HD) it came with a pretty long (maybe 8 foot) component cable. No HDMI cable in sight anywhere. I think Comcast was giving me a hint as to what worked best.
P.P.S. The folks on at least one (audioholics.com) site claim that running HDMI from just about any cable box through a switching receiver to, say, a TV or projector is just about bound to cause you problems. They blame it on cable box firmware, but I'm more inclined to just blame the blasted HDCP thing.
Hmmmm.... Cracking AACS is just the first attack on Blu-Ray. They have BD+ held "in reserve", right? Or was BD+ left out of the final spec? I have a feeling that the fine folks behind Blu-Ray (those rootkitting folks from Sony) knew AACS was gonna bite the dust quick, so they put BD+ in there as backup insurance.
Quality control, schmality control. Both original and generic manufacturers have to follow the exact same insane requirements put down by the FDA. The FDA audits the generics just as rigorously as the originals. The "original" manufacturers just have much higher overhead (TV advertising, etc.). Competition works, even though the original manufacturers would prefer that it didn't.
I find it hilarious that the Slashdot "democracy" will support Crichton on the inadvisability of gene patents while casting aspersions on his scientific opinion regarding enviroreligiosity. You can't have it both ways, guys and gals. Either the author of the TV ER series is a Hollywood kook, or he's a serious scientist and M.D. who has done his homework and knows what he's talking about.
They added the words "well regulated Militia" because those words were clearly understood in the 18th century. "well regulated" meant well-equipped, just like a "well regulated" clock in those days was "regulated" by an efficient and well-equipped mechanism that did what a clock's mechanism was supposed to do. As for "Militia", it was considered to consist of all able-bodied male non-slaves: "Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves?" -- Tench Coxe 20 Feb. 1788. Also see: "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." -- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188.
The 2nd Amendment is about self-protection; both protection against ordinary evildoers who would steal from, rape, and kill citzens of these United States, and against authoritarian organizations (external or internal), that have grown so large they would steal from, rape, and kill the citizens of these United States.
If the 2nd Amendment is out of date, then why is it that states like Vermont (otherwise a staunchly econo-authoritarian state) that have virtually no regulation of arms in the hands of private citizens have much lower crime rates than states like New Jersey (also econo-authoritarian, but compounding that by gross violations of the 2nd Amendment)?
If the 2nd Amendment is out of date, why hasn't it been repealed? They repealed the 18th Amendment via the 21st Amendment. Why don't they repeal the 2nd Amendment with a 29th Amendment? Perhaps it should be worded, "Because individuals are no longer smart enough to be trusted with self-protection, all weapons of any sort, including (but not limited to) firearms, knives, bludgeons, automobiles, aircraft, and long fingernails, are hereby prohibited from possession by the people of these United States."
The first Chin Emperor (Qin in modern romanization), ZHENG Ying (259-210BC), gave his Dynasty's name to the entire country of China. He burned all the books in the country and banned scholarly discussion of history. Sounds a lot like the current Emperor is just doing what a Chinese Emperor normally does. And that might explain why the Chinese people, whose sense of history extends far further back than most Westerners', tolerate his continued rule. A sense of "unity" for all of China comes from the Emperor. See the modern movie "Hero" for one take on this facet of Chinese culture.
He also changed his name to Shi Huangdi, meaning "First August God". This is certainly nothing that the current Emperor would ever deign to do.
Saying that both sides "have lied" and so "the truth is somewhere in between" somehow puts paid industry propagandists on the same credibility level as professional climate research scientists. (And does a great disservice to science, I think.) There is a fair amount of difference in the professional opinion of a corporate shill who is paid to spout the company line, and someone who has spent the majority of their life studying something.
Ad hominem attacks like "corporate shill" and "spout the company line" can easily be "refuted" by calling those who believe in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming "government hacks" and "Lysenkoists".
Remember that the vast majority of "scientific" believers in CAGW are directly or indirectly paid to spout the "company line" by politicians whose constant and ongoing motivation is to use other people's money to make themselves look like the Saviours of the World.
If the "solutions" to ACGW were less often "tremendously increase taxes" and "tremendously increase government regulations", I think you'd find fewer lies on both sides of this horrendously politicized issue.
Well, because it is a matter of belief. And when it's belief in a computer-generated prognostication of what things might be like 10, 50, or 100 years into the future, I'd rather believe in the tooth fairy.
Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, if not impossible. What we know for a certainty is that the "solutions" to the supposed problem of increasing CO2 concentrations proposed by Al Gore and his bevy of Lysenko-like "scientific" sycophants will cost $Billions and impoverish or kill the lives of billions of humans.
If climactic challenges come at some time in the future, humans are smart enough to either take advantage of them, or figure out a cost-effective way to deal with them in "real time".
Dealing with hypothetical future problems by imposing horrendous taxation and regulation now is simply foolish. And deciding this is foolish has nothing to do with whether you like or dislike big oil companies. It does have to do with whether you like the fact that humans are a part of the natural ecosystem on planet earth. If you dislike that fact, you generally agree with Gore and his Lysenkos. If you disagree with Gore & Co., somehow you are "in bed" with big oil and big corporations. Sorry, but I don't buy that link.
Is the human contribution to the currently measured CO2 increase enough to rise above the natural noise caused by volcanoes, ocean outgassing, animal respiration, etc?
Is a CO2 increase the major cause of the currently observed temperature increase, especially when you consider that more than 50% of the temperature increase in the last century occurred before 1940?
Is it possible that the dire climate change predictions in "an inconvenient truth" are exaggerated, and that there are self-righting mechanisms in the earth's ecosystem that have dealt with far higher CO2 levels in the past, and which will "naturally" solve the "problem" of excess CO2?
Is it possible that the "unnatural" solutions to the "problem" of increasing CO2 concentrations currently bandied about by the likes of Al "Consummate Politician" Gore, including huge tax increases, tremendous increases in costly regulation, and calls for reversion to pre-1900 levels of industrialization, are all merely disguised attempts to increase the size and power of coercive governmental organizations without regard to the cost in both $Billions and human lives lost or impoverished?
Are humans really a cancer on the surface of the earth, or are they actually the most vital organism nature has yet produced?
If Democrats and Republicans (or is that Republocrats and Demicans, or maybe Demublicans and Repocrats; it's really hard to tell one from the other these days) would quit minding everybody else's business (read Iraq) and stick to minding their own (read "Let's Raise Taxes!") then they wouldn't both (all) be universally scorned.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."
--Marx (Groucho)
Yes, optimism that free markets, engineers with market incentives, corporations faced with rising commodity prices, and common sense will be able to discover solutions to whatever environmental challenges might face humanity.
Why do we need $Billions of dollars of coercive regulations, price fixing (upward, as in $5.00/gal gasoline in Europe), and incessant political meddling from the coercive class?
Are we releasing millenia-old stores of H2O?
A: No, but Gaia is. And are millenia-old stores of CO2 being released by volcanoes, ocean outgassing, and animals enough to even completely mask human "contributions"?
We can add up the mass of CO2 in the atmosphere and compare with 100 years of burning that is how much we've added.
A: Well, have you done that? Has anybody? Al Gore? Bueller? Bueller?
What do animals breathe?
A: 02. So?
Three more questions:
Why is the presence of other GHG a cause for CO2 NOT to be a GHG?
A: Who said it wasn't? But if it is a minor contributor instead of the awful horror it is being made out to be by the CO2 detractors, then maybe the fuss is a smokescreen for something else.
Why didn't you do the work yourself?
A: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." -- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Is carbon dioxide the most important greenhouse gas?
(What about water vapor?)
What percentage of the currently detected carbon dioxide increase is directly attributable to human causes, and how can you verify that percentage?
What is the real motivation for the current defamation of carbon dioxide, a gas that is vital to the well-being of all plant life on earth?
(It couldn't be that carbon dioxide defamers are merely plugging their political platform of economic regression, de-industrialization, and humans-as-antiplanet-cancer, could it? Nahhh. Impossible!)
Well, it appears that the solar wind, which waxes and wanes along with sunspots, does have an effect on the earth's temperature: CO2 or Solar?.
It seems to me that humans have influenced earth's weather (a belief, I'll admit, not proven by any of the data I've seen so far), but I also believe that their influence may be a lot smaller than the doom and gloom crowd would have us believe.
Slashdot Mirror
No format will survive without the backing of at least some of the major movie studios. The DVD+HD format has the backing of exactly zero movie studios (unless there are some Chinese studios that back it, and that's the same as nothing for the American market).
If somebody doesn't get wise and release a dual-format Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player soon, I see the Chinese filling *that* gap. And they'll probably make billions doing so. It's the obvious answer to the current format wars. And the only thing stopping its appearance is the bullheaded stupidity of a lot of movie studio and electronics company executives.
Prohibitions against gambling work just as well as prohibitions against alcohol and other mind-altering substances. i.e. not at all, in either the real world or a virtual one. It's a losing battle, and Linden Labs will eventually lose this one.
I'd suspect that Linden is under some pressure from some government somewhere, and that's the real reason they're doing this.
There will always be people willing to trade their hard-earned Linden dollars for the thrill of possibly winning a lot more from someone else, no matter how long the odds. Those people will now take their money elsewhere, to the detriment of Linden Labs and all the denizens of Second Life.
If coercively-financed "science" were not the driver behind the current hysteria over Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, then you might have a point.
Just think what might happen if coercive financing for such "science" completely stopped, and taxpayers didn't have to pay for their own economic holocaust.
And economic holocaust is just what the catastrophists are calling for. See the Kyoto Protocol if you are an economic holocaust denier.
You say it could potentially end the human race. Well that's evidence of hysteria, not rationality. The only "evidence" for Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is a set of computer models that can never, and will never, be verified experimentally.
In the terminology of the scientific method so worshipped by those who tout the "consensus" on "global warming", these models are unverifiable.
I find it hilarious that the denizens of Slashdot, those most intimately familiar with the foibles of computation, would be so taken by a theory that is 99% based on computer models. Our planet's climatic system is just too large and chaotic for any computer model to ever even approach a reasonable facsimile of "truth". If computer models are so good at predicting the climate, how come your local weatherperson is only about 50% right about whether or not it's going to rain tomorrow?
The convenient lies of the global catastrophists are just the latest excuse for governments (world: UN, national: US Federal, state: California) to further their growth, intrusiveness, horrendous costs, and tyrannical control over our lives. Governmental costs both in dollars and in human lives are far more likely to cause the end of the human race than is Mother Nature.
The last time this kind of hysteria gripped the world, "they" banned DDT. Now, 80 Million preventable human deaths later, "they" are finally admitting "they" made a mistake and now allow DDT for the killing of malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Giant corporations are created by the government. They are chartered by the government. They are regulated by the government. 98% of the behavior you ridicule and hate is either required by regulation or statute. Given that arrogation of power over telcos (post roads etc. notwithstanding) isn't granted by the Constitution, and thus federal regulation of telcos is blatantly unconsitutional, this is a failure of government. You're just proposing more unconstitutional government intervention and higher taxation to provide government-financed infrastructure. We don't have government grocery stores, and we get provided pretty decent food because of it. The government school system has broken down to where it has become a prison system for indoctrinating its students ("Just another Brick in the Wall") in the primary efficacy of government solutions for all problems. And yet you propose more expensive (read "coercively-funded") bureaucratically-designed and -operated systems. You really think this will be better? Ah yes. And North Korea is a worker's paradise!!!
Muhahahahahah!
Lobbyist? Well, if the government didn't arrogate the (blatantly unconstitutional) power to regulate the telcos, then the lobbyists wouldn't have anything to lobby about. This is a government failure, not a market failure.
It's been nothing but problematic for me. Tried to get my DVI-D equipped Comcast (Motorola) cable box to talk to my HDMI equipped TV. It would never do anything but alternate decent picture and static every ten seconds or so. My guess is that the TV's HDMI implementation didn't include a non-encrypted mode. But it could be that the HDCP from the cable box was just way off-standard. Or both were off-standard. Or HDCP sucks. Your choice.
Then I hooked up my properly-HDMI-equipped HD (also Motorola) Comcast cable box to talk HDMI to my DLP projector. Besides the fact that it would just show random snow about every other time I turned it on, the HDMI picture was seriously maladjusted for color, brightness, contrast, etc. Now I could probably go in and recalibrate everything on the projector so that the HDMI picture looked as good as the (still working fabulously) component analog connection. But that's too much hassle. The component analog 1080i picture is superb, so I'm sticking with it. Fortunately, I found a 5M HDMI cable on amazon.com for only $14.95 or so, so I didn't spend much on the experiment.
From my perspective as a relatively technically-literate user, HDCP and HDMI suck bigtime. Don't waste your money.
P.S. When I got my Comcast HD box (the one with a 120GB Seagate drive that stores about 15 hours of HD) it came with a pretty long (maybe 8 foot) component cable. No HDMI cable in sight anywhere. I think Comcast was giving me a hint as to what worked best.
P.P.S. The folks on at least one (audioholics.com) site claim that running HDMI from just about any cable box through a switching receiver to, say, a TV or projector is just about bound to cause you problems. They blame it on cable box firmware, but I'm more inclined to just blame the blasted HDCP thing.
Hmmmm.... Cracking AACS is just the first attack on Blu-Ray. They have BD+ held "in reserve", right? Or was BD+ left out of the final spec? I have a feeling that the fine folks behind Blu-Ray (those rootkitting folks from Sony) knew AACS was gonna bite the dust quick, so they put BD+ in there as backup insurance.
Quality control, schmality control. Both original and generic manufacturers have to follow the exact same insane requirements put down by the FDA. The FDA audits the generics just as rigorously as the originals. The "original" manufacturers just have much higher overhead (TV advertising, etc.). Competition works, even though the original manufacturers would prefer that it didn't.
I find it hilarious that the Slashdot "democracy" will support Crichton on the inadvisability of gene patents while casting aspersions on his scientific opinion regarding enviroreligiosity. You can't have it both ways, guys and gals. Either the author of the TV ER series is a Hollywood kook, or he's a serious scientist and M.D. who has done his homework and knows what he's talking about.
They added the words "well regulated Militia" because those words were clearly understood in the 18th century. "well regulated" meant well-equipped, just like a "well regulated" clock in those days was "regulated" by an efficient and well-equipped mechanism that did what a clock's mechanism was supposed to do. As for "Militia", it was considered to consist of all able-bodied male non-slaves: "Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves?" -- Tench Coxe 20 Feb. 1788. Also see: "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." -- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188.
The 2nd Amendment is about self-protection; both protection against ordinary evildoers who would steal from, rape, and kill citzens of these United States, and against authoritarian organizations (external or internal), that have grown so large they would steal from, rape, and kill the citizens of these United States.
Amen! Amen! AMEN! Right on! Paine ROCKS! Just wish more politicos had read him, let alone heard of him.
I know you didn't mean this as lecture, but we need more preachin' like this, bruthah! Keep up the great posts!
The first Chin Emperor (Qin in modern romanization), ZHENG Ying (259-210BC), gave his Dynasty's name to the entire country of China. He burned all the books in the country and banned scholarly discussion of history. Sounds a lot like the current Emperor is just doing what a Chinese Emperor normally does. And that might explain why the Chinese people, whose sense of history extends far further back than most Westerners', tolerate his continued rule. A sense of "unity" for all of China comes from the Emperor. See the modern movie "Hero" for one take on this facet of Chinese culture.
He also changed his name to Shi Huangdi, meaning "First August God". This is certainly nothing that the current Emperor would ever deign to do.
Old Zen saying: "The sound of one hand clapping." But Zen is typically from Japan, so it may not apply.
Remember that the vast majority of "scientific" believers in CAGW are directly or indirectly paid to spout the "company line" by politicians whose constant and ongoing motivation is to use other people's money to make themselves look like the Saviours of the World.
If the "solutions" to ACGW were less often "tremendously increase taxes" and "tremendously increase government regulations", I think you'd find fewer lies on both sides of this horrendously politicized issue.
Hmmm... I believe we only have to wait 5,000,000,000 years for the sun to burn out.
Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, if not impossible. What we know for a certainty is that the "solutions" to the supposed problem of increasing CO2 concentrations proposed by Al Gore and his bevy of Lysenko-like "scientific" sycophants will cost $Billions and impoverish or kill the lives of billions of humans.
If climactic challenges come at some time in the future, humans are smart enough to either take advantage of them, or figure out a cost-effective way to deal with them in "real time".
Dealing with hypothetical future problems by imposing horrendous taxation and regulation now is simply foolish. And deciding this is foolish has nothing to do with whether you like or dislike big oil companies. It does have to do with whether you like the fact that humans are a part of the natural ecosystem on planet earth. If you dislike that fact, you generally agree with Gore and his Lysenkos. If you disagree with Gore & Co., somehow you are "in bed" with big oil and big corporations. Sorry, but I don't buy that link.
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." --Marx (Groucho)
Why do we need $Billions of dollars of coercive regulations, price fixing (upward, as in $5.00/gal gasoline in Europe), and incessant political meddling from the coercive class?
Answer: we don't.
A: No, but Gaia is. And are millenia-old stores of CO2 being released by volcanoes, ocean outgassing, and animals enough to even completely mask human "contributions"?
A: Well, have you done that? Has anybody? Al Gore? Bueller? Bueller?
A: 02. So?
Three more questions:
A: Who said it wasn't? But if it is a minor contributor instead of the awful horror it is being made out to be by the CO2 detractors, then maybe the fuss is a smokescreen for something else.
A: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." -- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
A: Good question. How about methane? How about the aforementioned H20 vapor? Consider "Does increasing carbon dioxide affect Earth's mean temperature? Yes, although probably only trivially and to a declining extent."
- Is carbon dioxide the most important greenhouse gas?
- What percentage of the currently detected carbon dioxide increase is directly attributable to human causes, and how can you verify that percentage?
- What is the real motivation for the current defamation of carbon dioxide, a gas that is vital to the well-being of all plant life on earth?
(It couldn't be that carbon dioxide defamers are merely plugging their political platform of economic regression, de-industrialization, and humans-as-antiplanet-cancer, could it? Nahhh. Impossible!)(What about water vapor?)
It seems to me that humans have influenced earth's weather (a belief, I'll admit, not proven by any of the data I've seen so far), but I also believe that their influence may be a lot smaller than the doom and gloom crowd would have us believe.